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Payton: That's a good point, but I think what's going on is that WMATA does not control its own destiny when it comes to Smartrip software. Implementing such a feature may be easy, in fact it may even be trivial, but in WMATA's case it still would require asking their Smartrip programming contractor, Cubic Transportation Systems, to change the software and perform testing, something that can't be done for free because it's not covered under the existing contract. My guess is that such a change to the contract would cost somewhere on the order of $10,000 based on my experience with similar government technical support contracts (about 100 hours of time billed at $100 per hour?).

It's different if WMATA has a "level of effort" contract with Cubic, though I don't know if they do. That way, as long as the level of effort contract still had some time left on it, WMATA could ask Cubic to do this software change and bill it against the hours in the LOE contract. Special projects like the upgrades anticipated next year could be done under a separate fixed-price (or cost plus fixed fee) contract like they are now.

WMATA's fare system is incompatible with entrance only billing. Unless we all went to flat fares, which would kill the central city short riders at the expense of the longer suburban commuters. It's a delicate balance now and would be terrible policy to try to change it now. My guess is that such a flat fare would be something like $3.00 per ride, might even be that high during non-peak too.

by Michael Perkins on Jan 5, 2009 10:08 pm • link • report